Software engineers of letsrun: I need some parental controls over my kids internet searching. Is there something I can put on the router that covers all devices in the house? Finding every old laptop and tablet and maintaining them in the future seems like too much work. Who’s got advice for me?
No. The engineers of the Internet designed it this way so you have no control over your kids and only they can see what your kids are up to. See also: Google purging location history for anyone who visited an abortion clinic so their dads don't find out.
HTTPS encryption is used on all major platforms, which prevents someone outside from eavesdropping. You would need to use SSL termination which is essentially where you have a device which spoofs the web server certificate (and then all of your devices are set up to accept the spoofed certificate). Without SSL termination, you can't peek into the contents of the HTTPS tunnel. HTTPS prevents, for example, your ISP from seeing your Google search history. Your ISP can see that you went to Google, but not what you searched for. Google wants to keep all that data for themselves.
Potentially you can run something locally on the machine to restrict web access, but that would be up to the software company as to what features. They would most likely route your DNS through their own filtered servers, but a wiley kid with admin access could probably turn that off pretty easily.
Parental controls were a distant afterthought of the Internet and nobody does it well.
There is not. You have to install parental controls on each and every device you have. My kids have an internet portal for school that has very strong parental controls that are maintained by the school. It is pretty solid and keeps them from searching for bad stuff and only allows them access to social media stuff that only their classmates can access (no access to any public social media stuff). We only let them access the internet via that portal.
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Concerned Parental Unit wrote:
Software engineers of letsrun: I need some parental controls over my kids internet searching. Is there something I can put on the router that covers all devices in the house? Finding every old laptop and tablet and maintaining them in the future seems like too much work. Who’s got advice for me?
there's nothing you can do apart from total disconnect. it is what is is.
The short answer is yes, some routers have controls, but they are not great.
Some Netgear routers have Disney Circle, and TP-link Deco routers have parental controls. Both will work well for younger kids, but as they get older it's harder to lock it down. VPNs can get around it. And there are also ways to masquerade devices with different/random mac addresses. Some use DNS lookups to filter (e.g. Open DNS family shield), and that is useless because it's easy to set a DNS sever for a specific device to bypass. Google also has a family app that can do some filtering and on/off controls that is decent for Android devices and chrome. I've used different combinations with varying degrees of success and frustration.
You'd be much better off using a VPN for all traffic on their devices.
Then again, fear the boobies I guess.
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